Mom and Dad

3.
Rena married Leno at 21 and had me, her first child, eleven months later. The children continued coming every two or three years until there were five. She was the youngest of three girls and grew up in the Taylor Street area of Chicago.

She was a devoted mother who never stopped worrying about her children. She was passionate about them, wanting them close by and always in line. Never one to hide her feelings, she always spoke her mind particularly with her husband and kids. Hers was not a quiet house with voices often raised in joy as well as anger. The battles she fought over the years - with her weight, her husband, her children, her religion, her in-laws - were sometimes painful but often healthy ones. Fires seldom smoldered within her for very long - loud eruptions either brought them to an end or at least put them out temporarily to be stoked up another time.

Rena kept a clean but disorderly house; she was always doing laundry, giving her kids baths or putting forth monumental efforts to sanitize one room while the others fell into chaos. She was an exceptional cook, able to feed twice as many as the table was set for at any given extraordinary meal.

“If I can cook it, bake it or wash it, I can do it,” she would say. “Just don’t ask me to sew it, draw it or paint it.”

She was as quick with a swat as a hug and worked hard to make sure her children were polite, respectful and unspoiled. She had her pet peeves about discipline and they were often enumerated in her discourses on “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a kid who...” The list expanded well over one thing, but included: “a kid who spits...who says ‘no’ to an adult...who lies (I just hate a liar!)...who is sneaky...who has a big mouth...who doesn’t wash…who listens in on adult conversations... who whines...who throws a tantrum...who gives Indian burns...” Spitters, liars and whiners were probably the greatest of kid criminals in my mother’s eyes, although tantrum throwers were kids we held in complete awe. Whenever we witnessed such behavior in a grocery store or at a party, we would look from the performer to my mother, mouths agape at his stupidity.

We would wonder, has this kid lost his mind? Doesn’t he know what fate awaits him at home when he pulls a stunt like this? Nothing is worth the punishment for throwing a tantrum!

Actually, none of us ever had the nerve to do such a thing because my mother’s threats, from a very early age, were enough to permanently dissuade us. After seeing her reaction to one tantrum, - the flashing eyes, the set jaw - and hearing “Give me just five minutes with that kid and we’ll see if he ever throws another tantrum,” we never tempted fate. It just wasn’t worth it.

Raising and caring for her children was my mother’s greatest joy. Cortland Street was where her family started to grow and where, in a short time, the family passed some of its own milestones. For my father, it was a time of changing from one job to another, still under the watchful and often critical eye of his parents who lived only a mile away.